


In the Aftermath of Freedom

by StellarRequiem



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Blind Locus, Coping, Depersonalization, Dissociation, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional Recovery, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Hallucinations, If Locus is completely neuro-typical I will eat my best hat with teriyaki, M/M, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, abuse recovery, canon character death, expressive language shutdown, felix will be in the fic despite being dead is what I'm getting at, ghost felix?, haunted by felix, memory of felix
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-20 08:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4779839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You needed him to keep you breathing, and you needed him in your thoughts. A bite at the back of your brain that told you what you’d done right and wrong. A tongue for the moments when yours grew corrupted and was no longer willing run. And he needed you. To keep him steady, to pull back on his runaway words, his endless, bloody sort of lust. His greed. His enthusiasm. His pettiness. His mouth.</p><p>He needed you to be there, at his back when he turned around. At his beck when he called. In his face when he lost.</p><p>At his side when he won.<br/>*<br/>The ups and downs of recovery--or, at least, what Locus would like to believe is recovery--as complicated by Felix's intrusive memory. And what Locus believes to be his ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. This is Not a Baptism

**Author's Note:**

> Ao3 in its infinite wisdom still doesn't understand the concept of tab. Or, if it does, I don't know how to make it happen. If any of you know a way to do that which isn't me clicking spacebar ten times, I'd love to know!

The day you met death was the day you lost your eyes.

You met him before “ _honorable discharge”_ and “ _negotiable compensation,”_ and before the alternative of “ _stay on”_ and _“full coverage.”_ Before the prickling in your burnt-out tear ducts as you accepted that you, Locus—No, _not Locus. That isn’t_ your _name—_ would never go home.

_"Then I'm staying."_

You met him before the light, the surgery, the headaches. Before the decision that it was better to perceive your life in accented grayscale than full color through your new eyes. Gray upon gray upon black with the exception of the high contrast pop of multicolor rank; a feature meant to simplify the battlefield that became the only way that you could see.

You met him long, long before that style of perception would turn a steel colored soldier into an icon with a golden halo in your mind.

You met death as a the liquid shadow of a camouflaged enemy came to take you; as plasma bled through the cracks in your helmet, pooled along the divider separating mouthpiece from visor, scalded away your skin. Melted through your muscle. It seeped past the lids you were too slow to close, that weren’t airtight enough to save you. 

You met death as the enemy choked and shuddered backwards into someone else's blade, the sound of its dying quiet beneath the volume of your screaming.

You met death as agony took hold of you by your eyes, and he took hold of you by your arm.

__"_ _ _Come on."_

You met him on the battlefield, but it wasn’t where he killed you.

He’d take you in the wake of the next few endless moments of noise and smells and feeling, his bloody sticky side hot beneath your hand, his weight—magnified by armor—dragging at your shoulder as he steered and you supported. As you made your way to some semblance of safety; slashing with bayonet and bludgeoning with gun butt in wide, blind arcs between the periodic, concentrated clamor of his gun and “ _right, left, damn it get down—”_ desperate, half-berating shouts. 

He’d take you, kill you, in the ramshackle medical tent where they told you no graft in the world could reconstruct your eyes. He’d take you when he told you what you were, now— _creepy—_ with white clouds in place of imploded pupils and melted irises.

( _Once, those had been hazel. A perfect blend of green that matched your armor and brown that matched your skin.  Eyes that saw too much, saw everything, too sharp to track and hard to train. You don’t know if you shoot like you do because of them, or despite them. It doesn’t matter. Does it?)_

He’d take you, kill you, as you forgot how to _be_ outside your armor, as you became the soldier they’d always told you to be, that you’d failed to be, before paying the price of your natural sight.

He'd take you, as you discovered that he _knew_ you, for all the hate between you. That he valued the tactical advantages of artificial, HUD augmented eyesight.

He’d take you as you realized that _you_ also knew him. His habits. His mannerisms. The swiftness of his knives and the directions he’d choose to aim them.

He’d take you as every human being left around you fell  and you reconciled what was left of your self-doubt with the advantages of becoming a machine; For being human was a losing battle but to be no-one, in that battle, was to have a chance to live.  He’d take you as he stood at your back amidst the smell and cooling-blood infrared sight of slaughter while the rhythm of bullets turned your arms to numb.

He’d take you, kill you, in the aftermath when your heart wanted to breathe again and he and your mind told it to stop.

He’d take you in the moment you came to understand that he tasted like blood and salt and metal and, beneath that, something sweet and full, like the memories of spices, like cinnamon and sugar; like something stranger and more tempting than the thought of going home.

He killed you when you followed him.

_"_ _Well, Locus?"_

_"_ _I don’t know. . ._

_Are_ _you?"_

*

 

You have a name you can’t bring yourself to say. You left it behind on a battlefield along with your face.

Getting back to that face from under your helmet feels like peeling away your skin. But you can't keep it on. You can't _keep_ it at all, at this point: It’s too recognizable. Too _you_ with its scuff-scars and its familiar pattern like a target over your eyes, with its cameras and sensors tucked into innumerable folds and layers.

( _Those were meant to feed a display. A projection. Now they feed visuals directly to your brain--you reconstructed the wiring to allow for that, having discovered early on that your new eyes disliked having the artificial world so near to them, the light so close in the dark space of a helmet, too much to use the display. It occurs to you now that perhaps you should never have had that problem. That you should have had it looked at, when the war was over. After “shut up and adjust, soldier,” had come to a close.)_

As it is, these headachy grayscale eyes are yours now. _Your_ broken eyes synced to _your_ helmet's HUD set in _your_ flesh, your mottled face.

( _They'd put muscle and skin back over the bone for you in that medical tent, but it's all they'd done for you. You've disliked mirrors for years, now, for the false color, surreal self they project, but you remember looking in one, once, and thinking your scars looked like a mask. A carnival mask. The kind that runs across your eyes, obscuring only enough of your face to make you unrecognizable from who you were. Like a billboard to give away who you are._ )

  _Your_ helmet stands between you and your other face. But it has to _go_. Nevertheless, you falter in the monumental effort of removing it. You _can_ take it off. You have. Plenty of times.

But none of them were the last.

In the end it's easier to pull off the rest of the armor first. Getting from ceramic to Kevlar to elastic is like tugging at a chapped lip: It stings less often, bleeds a little less, than flaying livelier flesh.  And when you do it that way, when you reach again for the helmet, it's less like peeling than biting down and severing.

The simultaneous volume and silence of the world outside the helmet is overwhelming. Quiet, but unmuffled. An improvement: The last time you took it off, it was almost too loud for you to stand it.

Loud, because Felix had been the one to take it.

_(He backed you into the control panel you were standing beside, talking, talking, talking and then reaching, talking over your demand to know what he was doing, why, why now, “is this the time **?”** silencing your irritation as you stood stock-still under his hands and he pulled away the helmet the world had come to  see as your face.)_

You'll go to your grave with that memory.

_(He'd stood on his toes, your stolen face in his hands, bit into your lip before he kissed you, and you'd found yourself unable or unwilling to respond_.)

It was the last time he tried to reach for you, a snarl taking over his mouth when yours wouldn't.

 " _Is there anything you can't make just a little more boring?"_

_"We have work to do."_

_"Yeah, tomorrow."_

_"You're being careless."_

_"And you're being irrational. But I suppose there's nothing new there, is there?"_

Irrational.

Insane.

_I'm not crazy._

_Aren't you though?_

His voice in your head is potent—he doesn't have to be beside you to mock you. That's a truth that, in the matter of hours since the mad rush of escaping Chorus stopped occupying your thoughts, you've already learned to hate.

_Leave me alone._

You think that, you almost say it to the empty air. As if he could hear you. Which he can't: Felix is dead, and your inaction killed him.

_He could have surrendered._

But he wouldn't have. You knew that when you made your choice to finally live for you—whoever that is, now—you, who could be without him, but knew, as you left, that he couldn't last alone.

But you can't change any of that.

You move on. To the task at hand:

You _have_ taken showers in the last few years, but very few without a fear of exposure. This is different. Where you are now, in this closed room, in this nowhere backwater place, in this old safe house, you don't think before closing the door. Don't worry that you might not hear someone coming in, standing between you and the counter where you laid out your armor. Your second skin.

The first skin shudders away from the temperature of the water as you step in, though you haven't made it particularly hot.  It bites. Droplets hit you too hard, are too hot too cold too hot, though you know it will be enough to make you shiver if you step away again. Water that feels like _knives—_

You run a palm up your bicep as you shudder. The lines of calluses that divide it take shape against your skin in a way that anchors you: The memory of where Kevlar had, at points, worn through cushioning as your grip had grown too right for too long on the same weapon day after day after day sparks against your sense of space, and forces you to ground. Reminds you that you have a body, and that it needs to breathe.

You inhale, an inverted burst of air, and swallow a spray of water droplets that translate immediately to a cough. The kind of irritating, raspy cough that only arises from the body's reaction to next to nothing for the sole sake of wasting effort and volume on making you feel worse than you did before. Coughing knocks you forward, stings inside your breast. You splay a hand across your breastbone, rattling your ribcage. The broad expanse of your chest answers like a drum in the confines of this narrow, bright-lit space.

You stand there under the weight of your own hand long after the rattle in your throat stops. After the wheeze from the lung you punctured a week ago falls inaudible. After the renewed blindness of pain radiating from your crashing-ship-splintered rib—still healing—fades to something you can stand.

You wait there forever for nothing in particular, posed like that.  Your hand. Your chest. Above your beating heart.  You've been a machine for so long but you can still feel it, pumping and shaking, strong beneath your breast.

You've had this heart for half a lifetime and you'll have it for the rest of one.

How did you dismiss its presence for so long?

_It was easy._

Easy like closing your eyes, like opening them again only after you've switched them off so that the world turns into nothing but the loudness of quiet and the feeling of running water. And the weight of your hand. Its callous-mottled surface feels rougher by comparison with your chest, the difference between sandpaper and a worn stone, skin that's suffered everything against  skin that's been sheltered under layers, kept so soft you might believe it were new if not for scattered patterns of pale scars. Without your eyes they're more like mountain ranges to your mind, rising alongside, and transecting, the fault lines of your musculature.

 Muscles that sit heavier on the scaffolds of your bones than they once did. Thick and weighty and broad, swatches of deltoids, of abdominals, of abductors like sides of beef hang from the width of your shoulders and the somewhat narrower V of your waist, muscles more _solid_ than _hard_.

_(You were leaner once, huge even then but made to feel small: light rations and a young age and a buzzing chaos of brewing fear and stress in your head had left you with little to spare for cushion between starving muscles and tired bones. You grew stronger only later on, became how you would stay, made of muscle with weight and solidity like steel girders, girders with the strength to fight gravity as it struggled to pull the contours of your abdomen, your shoulders, into the kind of topography Felix's fingers so loved to follow.)_

  _No. Not loved._ No part of Felix ever came from love.

Felix came only from need. And want.

And what he left was a feeling like a ditch carved out from your breastbone to your navel. Empty but for pooling water. 

You put your other hand across your stomach, half expecting it to fall through you--to chase after that void sensation--but your fingertips find only skin. Muscle. A narrow, barely present trail of hair.

_This is your body._

This is you.

_You_ are made of muscle and sinew and flesh and that feeling, wrapped up under all of it, like someone has emptied you of your organs. Felix’s hands still cold in your torso. His tongue still wet on your ear in that way that you half hated. His words still hot in your head, cauterizing your mind into sections. So that everything made sense.

He’s been in every inch of you.

For the first time, in this quiet place without him, the truth of that makes you feel stained.  Stained in the bright hard colors of him, that orange blink in your seas of gray. Covered in the creeping sense of him, heavy under the urge to duck and cover before his words could catch you, so that you could lash out with your own. Dirtied, forever, like you can never get him off. As if no amount scrubbing will ever cleanse you. As if the pressure of your palms could never console you _like he could_.

How can they? He’s too deep in you. _Festering._

_No . . ._

You dig your fingernails in. Into your chest, your abdomen; clutching at that _self_ you have now, the way _you_ feel under your hands, _your hands_ , trying to know yourself for you instead of feeling yourself through him. Reaching for what’s left of you— _you—_ in the dark behind your eyes. But he’s back there, too, in that dark. In the heat of water running through your hair, its tendrils of droplets snaking patterns across your scalp that remind you of his fingers.

You can’t ever wash him _off._

( _No,_ _you were wrong:_ _not festering_. Felix was a brand, never a wound.)

_No, I—_

You lower yourself in increments to the floor, settling knees in pooling water, hands still digging for what you are. For the heat of your being and the slabs of human meat you’re made of—proof that you exist. That you’re still a person— _Am I?—_ that you _want_ tobe a person _,_ after everything he pushed you to do. That he twisted and nudged and dragged from you. After everything you’ve willingly become.

Buckled, hunched over your dismay and your aloneness, over the cold and hollow wound he left in you, you wonder how it is that you so _miss him._


	2. This is Not a Metamorphosis

You can remember wanting to kill him. You didn’t expect to actually do it.

If anything, you expected _him_ to come after _you_. To wake to the kiss of a blade on your throat and his lips on your mouth, stifling the sound you would make when he was finished with you. You _expected_ him lose his temper and slash at you--waving his hands the way he did even with a knife in them--gutting you mid-sentence, mid accusation, mid-mockery, mid-laugh.

You expected him to put the sword you inherited from him through your gut when you reached the Tower of the Purge and told him _no._

Or _wait._

You would have done that. Said those words, one of those words, with or without Washington and his halo. You’re certain. In the end, you wouldn’t have questioned. You would have demanded.

_You would have failed._

Had he asked you in the face of that obstinacy to fight him, to force him to concede, what you don’t know is if you would have won. If you could’ve. If you could’ve made yourself **.** If you could have kept him out of your skull, if you could have put a bullet through his. After all, when you did succeed in killing him, it was with words and words alone.

_No._

_He killed himself._

He refused to surrender when he could have. When nothing, least of all you, would have stopped him, would have prevented him from seeing another dawn if he would have swallowed the thorny mass of his anger and his ego, if for only that long. He killed himself in the name of defiance. A dead resistance. He died for _nothing_. And for that, you could kill him again yourself.

( _You **wanted** to kill him all the time. Every time he opened his mouth. Every time he crossed a line whether red, in- sand, or chalk._ _You wanted to do it so often, as he stood before you, preening to the sound of his own voice, that you found the solution to not shouting at him, to not opening yourself up via your mouth, to not retorting and earning either his petty irritation or his laughter, was to apply your focus instead to pondering the innumerable ways that you could have cut him down. Knowing  he'd come for you later if you ever found the nerve to strike him, and that you would’ve had no choice but to kill him then, was all you ever clung to as he spoke. The urge to kill a quiet island in the constant storm of how he talked.)_

At the end of all you'd failed, though—at the tower—you no longer wanted to kill him at all. You just wanted to tell him _no._

You wanted to _choose._

And you did. 

*

You're not certain if it matters what the details of you look like. That the ends of your hair are splitting into delicate pitchfork shapes, sprouting branches like striplings.

You're not sure why you're supposed to care that the breaking catches the light and turns it three shades paler, revealing as it does how black hair at its core is, in your case, rather more like brown. Warmer than the blue black that made Felix's look like a crown of void to your gray-scale eyesight.

You're don’t know, without a helmet to fit it under, why cutting it is necessary at all.  From a practical standpoint, you even know it _isn't_. Your hair’s disheveled ends make no more _difference_ in your life than the color of your sweater. It shouldn’t matter.

But you remember that it does. That it matters to the people on the streets, unsure of how to look at your scar tissue mask and empty eyes already. Makes the difference between whether you seem to them a menace, or a pity.

_(The war went on long enough for civilians to recognize a plasma burn. They shirk from your sacrifice with an air of what they pretend is reverence.)_

They pity you, when you look like what they want. Plainly dressed. Never shabby. Like someone who could be employed.  Which you're not. If you look less than that, they eye you with suspicion.  _Like a war criminal._ Not a soldier _._ _Like a monster_.

Which you are.

And monsters get long looks from armored law enforcement officers as ready to drag away drunks as they are to fight off covenant waves, to battle liquid looking active-camo shades. They have to be. The war is never wholly over on this far edge of colonized space. This quiet nowhere rock not unlike how Chorus could have been, with its officers who will look at you. Who already have.

And so you have a choice, between what matters and what makes sense. Between what you can accomplish yourself with a hair tie and a pair of scissors, and the civilian cleanness that someone who cares for something as trivial as hair can execute. Between the satisfaction of self-sufficiency, and the discomfort of knowing that you no longer remember how to get a haircut. So you decide to learn. To get one.

Of all the trivial things.

 _Is this what they are_? You wonder, as you make your way down evening streets. As you pass the masses. With their love and lies and bickering and convictions. With their styles of dress, of presentation, of hair and face and body and clothes and selves made of skin instead of armor. _Is this what concerns them?_

You've seen people like this rip each other apart. You've seen people like this dismiss the enemies at their door even as you fought for them. While parts of your body died for them.

_What is it that any of you offer?_

. . .  _What do you?_

The monorail up ahead could plow through the station at the end of the sidewalk and kill fifty of them and take you, too, and it wouldn't make their empty values matter. Their nothing lives. It wouldn't make haircuts matter. Clothes. Petty conversation. The woman chattering on the phone six paces ahead of you could die, and it would not make _monedero_ , _zapatos_ , _vestido, entrevista_ matter. And if the person on the other end of her call came to treasure these empty words when she went, it would be because they were her last. Not because they were any less insignificant.

Insignificant. All of it.

And abrasive: The way their values paint you chafes as you walk through the door of your destination. The . . . _Haircut girl_ —there's a word for that you can't remember—behind the counter balks when you enter. Goes from small to smaller. Her one coworker, hidden in antique headphones, bent around a broom, doesn't notice you. The little one blinks three times before she addresses you. Asks how she can help. Which seems a stupid question.

"It’s too long," you tell her. She stutters.

"Oh. Well, ok. Did you . . .  want a cut or . . ."

 _Or a trim,_ she manages to add, eventually, once she's unhinged her teeth from the bottom lip she gnaws on as she stares at you with oversized eyes, wide, round eyes rolled up in her head because she won’t lift her face in your direction. Raise her chin. As if the rest of her is frozen.

She says other things, too, uhms and ohs and empty noise, and you don't know how to answer her. When something comes out of you, it's words that you don't think through; the answer that's briefer and easier and plainer. A solution one step above your chopping it off yourself. "Trim is fine."

With that, it's done.

_So these are the decisions that dominate your lives._

These are the kinds of words she can comprehend. The kind of invitation she can accept. She coaxes you toward a chair, and you pause for a moment, uncomprehending, as you struggle to reconcile yourself to the expectation that she would have you off your feet, boxed in by seat-back and arm rest, while she stands at your back with sharp objects in hand.

( _You'd watched Felix, once, glide up behind a disappointing pirate seated that same way, and drive a blade sideways through his neck, under his jaw, bathing him in blood in an instant. Over in a moment. And Felix had laughed. Given you a dissertation on the under-appreciated theatricality of driving for the jugular, its advantages as weighed against the taste of the challenge of getting through windpipe, skin, through layers, to open someone from ear to ear. You’d told him to get back to work.)_

You want no part of the chair.

"Is this necessary?" There’s something off with how you sound.

Haircut girl shrinks.  Blinks. And you know you've done something wrong.

_Fucked it up._

You think you can feel his echo laughing.

You were never the people person. You try to fix it, and you don't understand what it is that you're fixing.

". . . Will this take so long?" You add.

She sputters. Blinks. Ohs.

"Well, if you're in a hurry, I guess, I mean you don't have to sit down, I guess . . . Did you . . . " pause, breathe, calm, taking up her scissors with her composure, her resolve. "Did you want it styled? I _can_ take off just the split ends."

She swallows hard and settles into this small profession in the face of you as if it could protect her. Abandons her efforts to evaluate or fight you, clinging to her knife-sharp scissors, speaking with a frantic, forced directness. She doesn't smile.  Her face is telling you something, but you can't read what it is. She _sounds_ determined. And you wonder for a moment if that's a form of bravery.

It would make those words the most significant thing she's done.

"Does it make a difference?" you ask.

Haircut girl seizes that sentence like a starved dog and drowns you in a slurry of focused speech.

"If I style it, it will look cleaner down, but you may have more trouble putting it up without pieces falling in your eyes. Or your face." _Ey_ _es._

Acknowledging your eyes and the fact that you can still use them, despite their being use _less_ , is more than you’d have expected of her.  The raw material beneath their blank surfaces acts as the housing for the network of sensors and wiring you now rely on, and if something falls in front of them, it still matters.  But she couldn’t have known that. So you answer her with silence followed by a sound, indistinct and uncertain.

And you let her choose for you.

She changes it. Says you'll look cleaner cut. You choose, for a moment, to believe her and her conviction that any of this makes some kind of difference in your existence.

How can it? Your hair, your face, your _appearance,_ after all, are not you. They're your body. How you're realized. You, but not you. How they _feel_ , how they _work_ , that this is the skin in which you _live_ , that you _have_ a skin of your own, all your own, is what makes _you_. How it all looks is nothing. But haircut girl loses herself in it. in your senseless details.

While she works, drawing sharp scissors too near your jugular, you look at the face in the mirror that isn't you, that is you, that's you but doesn't suit you, and try not to see. It’s an exercise of your peripheral awareness with the added benefit of focusing the kind of addled mind that would love nothing better than to flinch from, or strike down, haircut girl every time the blades of her trade come into view. You hate the glint of them. So much so that you could crush every bone in her hand if only to watch her drop them. Splinter them to powder and sharp slivers like needles inside her skin. You could _shatter,_ without a second of regret, her tiny, steady hand. Her little fingers with their well-trained muscles and quick gestures, practiced— _honed,_ even—for the performance of a mundane service performed on empty people, who supposedly possess some fundamental value: The righteousness of being born human, _of being sentient,_ that you may have once believed in.

You’ve never seen such automatic value in yourself. You've _earned_ this existence. All of your wrong choices were right enough for that much: _You've_ survived. If nothing else. Nothing more.

 _(There was a time when you were something perfect because you were supposed to be. You used to be a soldier.  You used to have your orders. Shouted at you, stated to you, sung to you in truncated, convenient reprise to the tune of Felix, his voice his tone his presence, the weight of his hand on your shoulder. His definition of you like a bassline vibrating in your bones_. _You gladly chased his echoes.)_

What is your meaning now? You used to be a soldier. _You used to be_ _a monster_. And now you are nothing, too. One meaningless thing among billions, struggling to ignore what should be an equally meaningless object in the hands of a meaningless girl. Tuning out the flash of scissors so near your neck. So near the ragged edges of your mind. You catch them closing in on your reflection. Cornering the face that doesn’t suit you, prepared to snag on the body that is yours.

 _(You were someone once. You had a name. You had a face. You traded them for something, to become_ — _once, you were perfect. But were you ever true?)_

You can't remember, suddenly, why it was important that you come here. If it was important. You think there was a reason, a logic, and you can’t recall what it was so you stand stock-still and staring and wonder if the shape of your hair around your face, the way it stretches toward your shoulders, says something about you.

_You are meaningless, too._

Nameless, no one. You gave away your first one and have lost your connection to your second.  For a moment, for one moment, you can't even remember what it was. So you stare into the mirror until your own reflection turns to nothing but a blur, and try to wipe away what you see.

Before she's finished you will even go so far as to turn your eyes off altogether, only to choke instead on the sound of snipping. You hold your breath every time she moves, with every gesture, and you're dizzy when she puts the scissors down.

_Get a grip._

They're meaningless. Just scissors. Just objects.

But for a moment before you leave you think you see their reflection moving again in one of the mirrors, even after she's put them down. A flash with blurry orange edges. In the mirror, the glint of them— _meaningless_ —is level with your throat.

 

 


	3. This is Not a Homecoming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to Agent0hio for rescuing me from Felix's dialogue in the chapter. (And I do mean rescue. It was bad.)

You needed him.

You needed him to keep you breathing, and you needed him in your thoughts. A bite at the back of your brain that told you what you’d done right and wrong. A tongue for the moments when yours grew corrupted and was no longer willing run. And he needed you. To keep him steady, to pull back on his runaway words, his endless, bloody sort of lust. His greed. His enthusiasm. His pettiness. His mouth.

He needed you to be there, at his back when he turned around. At his beck when he called. In his face when he lost.

At his side when he won.

_(The first time you saw him broken was in blackness, replaced by infrared as you tried to see the source of sound in a room full of empty bunks.  A warm red silhouette upright in bed, curled over its knees, the cooler, yellow blobs of its fists pressed into the mattress. Night vision told you he was gripping it as if it could anchor him to the earth, and that doing so strained his broken thumb. A return to now-familiar dark explained in the shape of his shaking breathing that it would have made sense if he were screaming; that he was gritting his teeth instead. Your eyes off and your ears like live wires, you imagined  you could feel him from across the room, a being made of irreverence and clammy skin, liquid warmer than sweat pooling on his cheeks.)_

Felix built himself on you. On the foundation of your presence at his back when death and war—and the absence of it—closed in to take you both.

_(His shirt clung to his chest. The army's excuse for a blanket—the same on every bunk—lay waddled at his feet, pooling along the shore of his shins and crashing against his bent knees.)_

He built you, too. He fed you rusty nails and crumbling concrete and twisted rebar left over from what he'd taken from you to make himself, and he bolstered every inch of you with it. Made you a shell that should have kept you safe: a foundation for your own sense of self of nature of purpose. He watched you take the shape of nightmares and told you that you were rigid.

_(If there were words you didn’t have them. There was no protocol in the battlefield of a barrack that told you how to snap him out of it. If you needed to. The look of him left you stranded, adrift without rules of engagement.)_

A straight-backed ideal soldier.

_(When he caught you staring, he snarled, and sent a knife pin-wheeling in the direction of your face. You couldn’t tell whether his aim was as shaken as his wavering hand—if he missed or if he didn’t—as it embedded itself in the wall beside your bed. You spoke anyway.)_

Told you that you were the incarnate of professional.

 _(His weight on you, armorless, was nothing as he came to get his knife back from your wall, climbing over you in the process, furious in the wake of your retort. Fingers around the hilt, legs around your waist— your fist was in his gut. He was cold with sweat and warm with_ something _, shaking where he sat, fingers refusing to close around the thing he wanted to kill you with. You grabbed his wrist and twisted it free of his weapon. Caught his free hand in yours. He tried to bite you, a loud clack of bright but battle-cracked teeth an inch from you in the dark. You listened for him. Smelled. Felt him breathing like the verge of sobs and shaking under the cold of sweat like a mist across his forehead his shoulders his chest, with a quaking in his muscles even they didn’t want to admit, a rebellion of individual fibers neurons couldn’t control. You told him “Don’t,” and let him go.)_

He put a taste in your mouth with the tip of his tongue that made contracts feel like orders as you swallowed them. He pulled from you the best you were and fed it back to you in increments you begged for.

_(“Try and stop me,” he retorted, words spoken with his blade against your throat. You stayed silent, not because you feared him, but because you felt him. It was the first time his incessancy made sense to you. That you thought you understood.)_

You needed him to love what it was that he had made you.  To need it. To approve it. To temper it with words that punched through your chest and stuck in your mind, that still stick to you, now, like barbs in your deep tissues. To make you all you were.

_(It was not the first time that you kissed him; only the first you wanted to.)_

You needed him to see you. To be the eyes he'd watched you lose. To let you look through him, so that you might avoid looking at yourself.

*

Bleeding out onto the dusty floor of an ancient warehouse, it’s difficult to understand why you’d thought this was a good idea.

At the time it had seemed, with new paint on old armor, with the active camo unit still available to you, your HUD still synced to your artificial eyesight, that you had some kind of sensible advantage. That you were an infiltrator, still, even after so many years on the front line and in back rooms, plotting the movements of squads, platoons, battalions—before you let Felix kill too many soldiers to form them—that you would lead to death  and victory. You’d believed you could still move like a shadow in the dark. That you could grapple well enough to silence your opposition without the use of your gun.

That had been your mistake.

They’d caught you, a lucky knife in your back disrupting your camo, three men into your attack. There had been six of them still to go.

To your right and left, they lie dead.

         _“I’m sorry, I thought you said ‘no more killing?’”_

“I didn’t have a choice.”

_“Of course you did. That’s what you’re all about, now, isn’t it? Choice?”_

Your HUD flickers. A warning in white on gray declaring a reallocation of power. From your non-essential systems. From your eyes, your display. It won’t help: there’s a bullet in your back and a gash across your thigh. You’re painting the room red, between the two wounds, too fast for your armor to match; though it races after your hemorrhaging nevertheless, still trying to catch it, still trying to slow it down. You push your helmet from your head. Your hair sticks to the bleeding floor.

          “ _I can see it’s working out real well for you.”_

You have nothing to say to this, to what remains of his voice. You've always believed in choice. You just don't have life in you left to tell him, not like this, not now, when the world is cold the floor is sticky you are dying and there’s a storage unit wrapped in your fist that could make a difference in the galaxy you’ve damaged if you only had someone to hand it to. You don’t, though. And you will die meaningless. You will fade away having failed. You will have rectified nothing. No part of what you’ve done, and what he allowed of you.

_(Shaken, you clung to protocol, and “we have our orders” is what he told you. You held to his armor-heavy hand like a life raft in a maelstrom. Like his voice in a firefight. Like the solidity of his back against yours, hot beneath the blankets, an anchor in the dark. He reached for you and you looked to him and from the heat of his mouth and the burn of his words you made an offering: a promise to murder a world. He let you call your contract “orders.”)_

You will die because of the reluctant _,_ hesitant breed of monster you have become. You will die because you no longer understand how to work alone.

         “ _This shit right here is why you need me.”_

“If I still needed you, I wouldn’t have come here.”

         _“Oh, you wish.”_

On your deathbed, still you fight him. But that was always how it was.  Sans visor, absent your HUD, you stare into the lightless ceiling and defy him, battling his influence as your world goes dim to night vision, to grayscale, to full spectrum color not much different than the gray. You are fading, fainting, in the dark for your efforts, and he is mocking you. That was always how it was.

_(Having him beside you became a teeth and nails back and forth of shouted and snarled words. A tug of war between the contrary battles of the field and your barracks; a dance to knives’ songs and gunfire. But there came a point when you called him partner.)_

“I was supposed . . . to fix this.”

          " _Would you please wake the fuck up? You can't fix a galaxy that was already broken."_

"I have to . . . _I_ broke . . . this. And _you_ —"

 _"What, I made you? Are you seriously about to try that right now?"_ He laughs, a short, bitter cacophony in your liquefying mind, _"You signed your own contracts, asshole."_

"You told me it was right."

       “ _Of course I did. And it seemed to make you feel better.Mission accomplished."_

Of course you believed him. He was all you had to trust. When you were an empty suit, a grunt, cannon fodder, he was a voice, a contradiction, the professional. When you were a ghost with an honorable discharge, he was direction, a ticket to more. When your heart was racing and you couldn’t breathe or speak and all the world was turning to light and sound and what you’d thought then would be the feeling of dying, he was a shout louder than everything, louder than your runaway heart and the screaming of adrenaline tearing out your insides. When there was nothing left in you but anger he pointed you toward an enemy and let you hold the balance of life and death over their head until you could breathe again. When, for hazy seconds, you wanted to be human again, he grabbed you as you reached for him. With digging fingertips and a painful grip that locked you back into the world.

_(You leaned against each other even with your hands in one another’s insides, as you tore at each other’s entrails, as he rearranged yours into the shapes that suited him. Into a resource he could want. You carried each other, elbow deep in one another’s blood; the last two standing from your bitter band of brothers.)_

Of course you believed him: he was your only way forward.

_(You left in armor and you met in it, and he became the sound of his voice in your mind, the sound of his surname through your captain's radio, the furious irritation that made you want to gut him because of his irreverence for silence. His irreverence for life.)_

He made you into something when you were nothing but a shell and turned you loose on a world where you’d grown into something else. Something that would leave him behind.

_When did you know you would abandon him?_

You are too cold to shiver, too empty already to vomit. But you feel like doing both, and you can’t take back the thought.

_. . . When I knew he'd lied._

About everything you were.

_(There was a moment in your existence like a dying spark when you thought that living mattered, before fortune turned it bitter. He became a piece of the vacuum in which who you were was smothered. You had a name, you were a soldier. You had a name, you were, you had a—)_

You will die nothing, you will die free. You will die a failure.

_“Was it worth it, Locus?”_

He is a glimmer. An ember of orange in a world you can no longer see, that’s smeared together into slow dimming nothing. A light in a moment when you hate the dark. You are fading on the floor. There is a storage unit in your hand.  It was meant to fix you. You are freezing, bloodless, on the floor. He is an ember.

You will die nothing.

And you don’t know how to answer, as everything but the color of his armor fades to nothing; as a blur of dark orange, leaning into your field of view, floating somewhere above you, becomes the only thing that you can see. Coming to swallow you as you end. To take you back to him.

"Felix—"

          “ _What the fuck do you_ want _?”_

"— _Help me_."

 


	4. This is Not Forgiveness

You knew what he was when you met him.

 _(_ " _Because you're you," you told him, and_ _he hadn't argued.  Did you never wonder why? He knew himself. It was only a matter of admitting it.)_

A prickle in your captain’s ear, a pressure point at the hollow center of your platoon that could determine the kind of day the rest of you would see. He had a snake’s tongue and Coyote‘s eyes, and they flashed like gunfire when he spoke.

_(But he was an actor, he was a professional, he was a performer. He was an escape artist, and he dodged the things you questioned and pulled the floor out from under you as he went. He didn’t want to question. After your eyes, you didn’t ask him to.)_

You knew what he was when you met him. _He was the death of you._ He was the palpable sweetness that sometimes follows a lie, and the choke that precedes it. He was—

He was.

And you— _a suit of armor and a gun, a Felix-colored gun—_ were not.

 _(You wanted what he did to you. He sent you ahead and pulled you along, he took you and threw you and dragged you from the dust of who you were. The rubble you couldn’t stop searching through, a compulsion to rediscover something dead, and in the end it was easier to let him paint you instead.  You wore the marks of him on your body like a mirror image of his tattoos, an intricate and interlocking pattern only you and he could see. You liked the color that it brought to you._ _With the patterns of him living on you, turning you orange-flushed and vibrant in your colorless new world, you felt full. A suit of armor, maybe, but not an empty one. It was Felix that was hollow.)_

You knew his games before he played them, could see what it was that he wanted, the way he’d dance to get it. And Felix _asked_ the first time, when he wanted to dance with you.  You were the one who accepted.

He came to you, again and again and again, until it was you that came to him.

_(You were not a victim, you told yourself as you came to need him, you were not a crutch you were not a toy you were not susceptible to the alcoholic burn of his words as you swallowed them by the gallon.)_

You were a willing partner.

That fact rings inside your skull as you wake to a bed of cooling blood and dirty floor. You stick to it when you try to rise, your hair gluing you to your own coagulated losses. _You did this to yourself._ Words blur in your head as it spins. You couldn’t force them into voice if you wanted to.

As you shake off armor-administrated sedative, you come to understand that you will live, if only barely. If with less blood in your body. Rescued by your second skin.

_(He was your shield, and he became your home.)_

You are alive, you are alone. Your grayscale is a shade too warm, tinted with the color of his ghost. _You asked._ Asked for his help as you lay dying. Asked for _his_ intervention as you decided, for some indefinable reason, to cling to an act of living you're not sure that you deserve. _You asked for_ _him_.

You wonder if that makes it your fault.

*

The mattress on the safe house floor isn't gentle with you for the period in which you all but live on it. The patched up gash in your leg resents your body weight, and the twin holes in your back—one shaped like a bullet, one shaped like a blade—prefer you prone to supine and despise the lateral compression of lying on your side. For three days you lie on your stomach instead, your head cranked sideways, while you wait for your body to remember how to bear your own weight, and for your aching mind to stop asking—six or seven times an hour—if it’s so very necessary to conserve your medical supplies.

_(Last you were immobilized like this was in the name of a tibia and fibula reduced to sharp and unforgiving shrapnel. The pieces that punched through your leg would leave a permanent line of perforations along your shin that remain even now, long after your bones have returned to their rightful place.)_

For three days you dream of dead men. Nine of them. All with Felix’s face. You wake sweat-wet and shivering, unsure if you’re more afraid of having to see him, or of how numb your nightmare feels. The image of his body over and over and over every time you close your eyes shouldn’t sit so low in your chest, shouldn’t feel less like pain than heaviness.

_(_ _Felix had pushed your bones back through your skin, and tied you by your ankle to the ceiling. He gave you his lips to bite down on as you waited out the agony of armor-assisted traction that was the only solution available to you on a small colony world with close communities and suspicious medics. Later, he held you upright under the shower’s stream while it rinsed the blood from your shin, a solid levy between you and gravity. You felt heavy—too concentrated—in his arms.)_

Heaviness is all you have.

You wake knowing that the men you killed and their dark armor and the heaps their bodies fell in didn’t look like Felix at all.

_(You found him splayed across a rock outcrop seventy feet down, flat on his back with a shattered visor, though you had to pull away his helmet before you were able to close his eyes. He died with his mouth open. With most of the blood contained by Kevlar, except where it stained his teeth.)_

For three days the one supply you don’t conserve is sedative, and once your leg is semi-functional again, you take your first step on it with a haze at the edges of your vision, a delay as you move your eyes over the room, and a scarcity of depth perception that plagues every modality of seeing that you have. In the end you turn vision off entirely, exchanging it for feeling and haphazard, wound-and-sedation weakened balance. You have to shower with your shoulder dug into the wall. You eat with a palm flat on the counter, fingers splayed to take your weight.  You stumble on your way back to your mattress, and sit for an hour in a state of slowly fading delirium before you can stand to re-engage your eyes to a world with uncertain edges. You wonder how you could have gotten the dose of your sedative so incredibly wrong: Even as your body comes back online, your brain remains silent. Like living in a fog.

You want to sleep until you die.

         _“Oh, by all means. Please do.”_

You don’t respond. You want no part of his memory while your head is already clouded.

You decide not to encourage him.

         “ _Was it worth it?”_ he asks again, as you reach at last for your stolen storage unit. To peruse the information that nearly killed you.

“Yes.”

_Was it?_

You’d only had so much time. Only viewed so much. You were already bleeding by the time you gained access to the file you thought could be the one you’d want.

         “ _Then let’s see it.”_

_Not in front of him._

“No.”

          “ _What a vote of fucking confidence.”_

“Leave me alone.”

              “ _You sure? Because I seem to remember you_ asking _for me. Oh, let’s see, what was it . . . right: does ‘Felix, help me?’ ring any bells?”_

“I was hallucinating.”

            “ _Were you?”_

You try to stare down at the storage unit in your hand past the reverberation of his voice in your cotton mind. You try to make yourself open it. Upload it. See what it is that you’ve won. But your fingers close around it and don’t seem willing to unclench. _Make them._

This is you. Your body. You can make it behave.

This is you. Your mind. _I’m not crazy._

Your fingers won’t come loose.

            “ _You know what, you’re right. You clearly have a handle on your little quest, here, don’t mind me. You’ve got it all figured out. Step one, obtain data: check. Step two, actually look at it: che—oh, wait, never mind, you actually_ can’t _handle that much, can you? What is it, Locs? Afraid of what you’ll find?”_

_Afraid to know you you’ve failed?_

You ignore him.

Your fingers still won’t move. His answering laughter is sharp and sudden.

          “ _This is just pathetic.”_

You cannot make them move.

“Leave. Me. Alone.” The words are all you have.

_“No.”_

It’s the first time he sounds angry, the first, anyway, since you killed him. _I didn’t—_

He sounds, not scathing, not dismissive, not resentful or sarcastic, but seething. Dangerous. And separate, somehow. Independent from your mind. You look up to follow the sound, snapping your head around too sharply so that a wave of nausea rises up in your throat to blockade your ability to speak. He takes advantage of your silence.

          “ _You don’t get to be alone. You don’t get to throw me away and pretend like you had something else to live for. You didn’t._

Of course you did. You must have.

_“You didn’t even have a name.”_

“Stop talking.”

         “ _You didn’t even have a face.”_

_“Felix—”_

_“You had_ me.”

His voice is so _loud._ It bombards you from the corner of the room, and reverberates in your throbbing skull. _You’re still hallucinating._

But he sounds so far outside of you.

          “ _Don’t act like you can just walk away from me, Locus.”_

But you already did. And—you realize with a feeling like liquid nitrogen pumping into your gut, a cold and heavy agony accompanied by the sudden urge to vomit—that he’ll never forgive you for it.

 _It doesn’t matter._ You don’t want it to matter. _He’s dead. It can’t . . ._

But you try and answer him, anyway.

“All _I_ wanted—”

_(He’s dead and you knew it because when you picked up the sword he’d hurled at you, you felt it come alive. He died and when he did it lived, breathed, prickled in your hand in some manner that had nothing to do with its sparking plasma heat, its smell like the memory of burning flesh and blinded eyes and o-zone. You picked it up and it felt like Felix. And then it burned cold, and felt like you.)_

He laughs and your skull feels like it’s cracking down the middle. A long, low, bitter cackle, it draws your eye even as you knot the fingers of your free hand in your still-damp hair, clutching at your head to stop the ice pick he’s driving into your brain.

           “ _Do you think I care what you wanted? Do you think I give a shit why you did it? You screwed me, Locus. Fuck the ‘why.’ All that matters is that you did it.”_

 _That’s not true,_ you want to tell him.

_It matters._

But you can’t speak. You can’t make the words fit in your mouth, the sound come through your throat. You are cold and nausea and heaviness: There’s nowhere left in you to store words, let alone to form them. All you can do is look. In searing color. In hazy grayscale.  In shapeless infrared.

Infrared is how you see him.

A cold place against the wall. A silhouette of deep blue with balled up fists at its sides, shimmering at its edges as it shakes.

You want to scream.

 _You are hallucinating._ It’s the sedative. It’s the weight of his memory, of knowing that, if he could, this is exactly what he’d say. But he can’t. _This isn’t real._

          “ _Feel crazy, yet?”_ he snaps. “ _Imagine how I feel.”_

You need to speak. You need to. You need to tell him _no._

_“To think I trusted you.”_

Infrared night vision ultraviolet full color, you see him now in all of them.

_No. No—_

_You’re dead. You’re dead._

He died and you did what you could to bury him.

_(A grenade and a rock slide and a sheltered place, his helmet on the end of an uprooted branch to mark his mausoleum. You’d carried him inside the inlet in the rock you’d found and felt the shapelessness of so many shattered bones, the cooling heat of bleeding through his Kevlar, the impossible weight of such a slender corpse— You’d wanted to lay down beside him until either your splintered ribs healed or you died, and it’s then you’d understood the wrongness of it: he must always have expected for you to go first.)_

_You’re dead,_ you try and tell him.

He laughs again, without so much as the shadow of a smile.

          “Yeah, asshole, I am. Thanks a million.”

 

 


	5. This is Not Undoing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay on this one--I was . . . distracted.
> 
> On a another (completely related) note, one of the flashback pieces from this chapter ended up running away from me, and now I'm the proud(ish) mother of 10k worth of emotionally complicated spinoff smut from both mercs' POVs. You can find it here if you missed it: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5043901/chapters/11596912 .

You knew what he was, but not what he’d done. That he was doing it—that he was doing it to _you._

You should have known that it could touch you. That it had. Should have understood that the line he’d danced you along was falling away beneath your feet in increments of lightyears while you slackened in his arms; while you fell into his tempo and the way he tasted when he spoke. But you didn’t. You never knew a thing, because you lost yourself instead to lilting, chosen words. _Orders_. Orders for the soldier. For the empty armor. Orders you knew he’d never cared for.

Orders, affirmations, doubts _._ These are how he remade you.

          “ _I thought you were a soldier?”_

 He’d asked you that and laughed at you. And then he’d told you to go to war.

Asked you— _told you—_ whether you wanted to. Reminded you of how it felt— _how he wanted it to feel—_ how you were supposed to _remember_ it to have felt.

_(You’d thought you could recall fire and heat and rage and power and a balance, recall a calm that came from knowing where life and death both lay: One in each of your palms, they unified in the barrel of your gun. The first time you’d seen him broken was after battle, but you believed the narrative he spun.)_

He spoke he coaxed he _told_ , and he let you forget the chaos inherent to war. Let you forget why you should have said “ _no”_ to a backwater planet called Chorus.

There were a hundred million reasons for that answer, and he should have known them all. He had, after all, watched your resolve crumble across years and battlefields while you became the hollow thing you are. The thing he must have known you wouldn’t want to be. But that metamorphosis had left a hole in your carved-out heart big enough for him to take for his own. He’d been all too content to pull its ragged edges into the shape most comfortable for him to nest in instead; twisting the elements of the soldier you were told into the soldier you willingly became. _The monster._ The kind of soldier that suited Felix. An archetypehe could vilify or worship depending on whether he wanted to encourage or demean you.

You’d known, to some extent, how false his commentary was. It was half of why you hated him, why you wished the injury that scarred his lip would have taken his tongue as well, why you’d fantasized, once—drunk, tangled in him, pulling the taste of whisky from his mouth—of biting it off yourself. 

What you hadn’t understood is how well it _worked_ on you. For all your anger, for all your snide retorts, for all his inconsistent narratives, it worked on you _every time._ It worked in the War. It worked in the aftermath. It worked to get you to Chorus.

Just as he’d known it would.

_"I thought you were a soldier?"_

He’d thrown those words at you, and the way he said them—you’d wanted to tell him, to show him, to beat into him that he was _right_. That a soldier was what you were. And that a soldier needed a war.

_(He goaded you into becoming the thing you’d never meant to be in the same way he’d readjusted the then-new ring in his lip with the tip of his tongue and the edge of his teeth: knowing that he shouldn’t, but caring too little to stop.)_

Hurting you, for Felix, was as easy and effective as a reflex.

*

You’d thought you’d be happy to see him when you got to Chorus.

You think, for one irrational moment, that you should be happy to see him now. If only so you can fix the things you didn’t have a chance to say. _I didn’t want you dead_. Just gone.

_(The sight of him on Chorus sank through you like a stone. You let him battle you, shoot at you, warn you with seconds to spare what he intended to do, on three different occasions before you met him somewhere you could reach for him. You couldn’t find words for him even after you were alone. When he opened his mouth you buried it in yours and consumed him right there on the floor with half your armor on, with his dark hair snagging on your Kevlar fingers. You kissed him with a cracked lip that turned his tongue to copper as you greeted him with bruises shaped like ceramic plating and your fingertips. With your teeth sunk into his neck. You wouldn’t let him welcome you until he’d begged you, and he wouldn’t let you go until you’d answered, breathing out your soul to him with a groan.)_

Instead you look at him and you see a terrible inversion of everything you’d sought to accomplish, his specter come to ruin you, and everything you might have become without him. His ghost doesn’t inflict fear so much as panic.

Your fingers loosen from the storage unit and it clatters to the floor. Your body makes a similar, heavier sound as you reel backward off the mattress. Your leg strains. You think you can feel it ripping. The bullet wound in your back screams to the tune of dull, throbbing agony, the same kind of screaming that you think might have come from your mouth if only you could speak. The first thing you are actually able to say to him is “no.”

It's also the last. The world bubbles out of you, bitter and lurching like reflux, and your throat clamps shut behind it. You can feel it, sticking to itself, a moist but grating feeling as it swells and rubs and closes. As it scrapes across what little air you can get through your open mouth. _No._

Felix snorts.

          "Always the smooth talker," he scoffs. "You see, Locus? This is why you need me."

 _No,_ you want to scream it.

_Make it stop._

You want to trade him places. Trade him for his fall, for his broken decaying body and his improvised mausoleum, for the hazy outline of his form. You'd take it all, if it would make this delusion stop. Because it is that. A delusion.

It has to be.

_But I'm not—_

But you _are_. Oh, but you must be. ‘Lunatic’ and ‘madman’ go too well with ‘monster’ for you not to be insane. He was right, all those times, when he told you that you were.

_(The first time was in a firefight, as he knocked you aside, ruined your shot and saved your shields. You'd counted on them taking the impact of whatever came at you in the instant it would take you to acquire your target. You were fast enough. You might not have been hit at all. But whether you would have or not you never knew, the opportunity stolen from you by the impact of Felix's armored foot against your ribcage, evidence of his unwillingness to put his torso in the line of fire to shove you, and of his mistrust in your judgement. The blow knocked the air from your lungs, and the sound of it bursting free of you, a roar inside your helmet, almost drowned out his words. "Are you insane?")_

You can't breathe.

He's standing there in front of you, leaning against a wall he could probably waltz through, fists closed, pinned down by his crossed arms, and you look at him and you cannot _breathe_.

_(It was worse the second time he said it. In a room full of squad mates, gathered over meals they barely wanted to eat, nursing injuries and psychoses while they traded survival stories in the aftermath of battle, Felix’s contribution brash and unforgiving above the din. "Same old same old. Lots of dead aliens, couple broken bones, and Private Bullseye over here is still out of his fucking mind.”_ _A retort had burst in your mouth, too adamant and too fast, when he said it._

_"I am_ not _."_

  _Words like a lunge, a strike. The retaliation of a trapped animal, they caught and broke across your tongue while Felix laughed. "Right," he said. "Keep telling yourself that.")_

You can’t breathe past the fact that he was _right_ , about everything, about you, about _everything—_

_No . . ._

_You_ know that's not true.

You know that he was wrong, at least sometimes, if only because of the way it chills you to your core to look at him, the feeling like your stomach has been vacuumed out, suctioned shut, as if it’s adhering to its own dry walls in a wad of unhappy tissue. He’s been wrong before and he could be now— _He isn’t—_ but you can't make yourself believe it as your brain and body shut down.

_(The last time he ever said it was the first you didn’t believe him._

_“Says the raving lunatic." He’d flung the words at you on his way out the door because he had nothing else to say for himself. For what he was doing. And for an instant a series of words crowded on your tongue and knocked against you teeth, begging to be free: “I’m not crazy. You’re just wrong.” You never said it aloud.)_

You have no argument against him now, against his claim, his accusation. _Lunatic._ If you could speak your voice would shatter.

_I am insane._

The words crack even in your thoughts.

Felix straightens up. His phantom glides away from the wall and he stares at you with his head cocked and a brow raised, the edge of his lip pulled under his teeth as he fiddles with his piercing. He releases it with a sound not entirely like a sigh. Not entirely like amusement. A noncommittal noise as weightless as the air he no longer breathes, it sounds almost like surprise.

           “Well, yeah,” he concedes, and every syllable is searing, ringing in your skull, “you were always crazy. But that has shit to do with me.”

Felix saunters toward you as he speaks, without uncrossing his arms, keeping them locked around his hazy torso. He looks tangible but somehow faded. Distant and filtered and dull, and bloodless-pale.  But he sounds like himself. Moves like himself. And it’s all that you can take. You bury your face, a last pathetic effort to chase him out, drawing your palms over your eyes with your fingers digging in along your hairline in a halo of desperate pressure, and you curl up into nothing. As he strolls over to you, you buckle.

You’d rather be insane than suffer this.

_(You remember the way his body looked with all his cracked beliefs splattered across his face, frozen in his lightless, empty eyes, and you remember faltering misery and crippling grief and “what have I done,” but you also remember it washing away into relief. To vindication. You shook as you departed his mausoleum, terrified of the enormity of freedom, but feeling light enough to fly. Nothing but this has grounded you since.)_

Your body feels like air.

For a moment that’s all that you know. The rest of the world escapes you as you inhale the smell of soap off your palms. There is one terrifying, glorious minute in which your thoughts flatline and you can’t remember what it is you’re hiding from, can’t feel the impressions of your fingernails in your scalp, can’t tell if the distant sensation of heat is coming from renewed bleeding in your leg, or something else. You’ve let go. Slid free of your own brain to become a ghost of your own. It’s a welcome sensation up until the moment when you realize you can’t get back. It’s then that the sound starts, a panting, heaving, staccato whine in the muffled distance. A body sound. A breathing sound. You wonder whose it is. If it could be you— _who are you,_ have you answered that, yet? _Who are you—_ and who else it could possibly be.

There’s a feeling in you somewhere of something straining. Your heart, you think, stuttering in your chest. You try to chase the feeling. Grab hold of that frantic beating before exhaustion wins out and stops it in your absence. You have to feel for it in the dark, and it seems somehow like that should be easy for you. It isn’t. By the time you catch up to your racing pulse, you can almost remember who you are.

  _Locus,_ not Locus.

Crazy, _not crazy._

Alone—

          _Don’t you get it? You were never alone._

It was never enough for him to leave a bruise where he could leave a scar.

         “Locus.”

He says your name until it brings you back. Or as close to back as you can reach: You can _feel_ your body—your arms, your legs, your fingers in your hair. But none of it seems like it belongs to you. The world looks two dimensional. Like a video screen. How you know that, you can’t be sure: you can see yourself from where you’re drifting, and your eyes are clearly covered. Switched off and dead behind your hands. But you do know, and you can see, and you’re aware—despite your distance—that Felix is standing over you.

_Go away._

“I _can’t_ , asshole, that’s the point. I’m stuckhere. With _you_.”

 _With you_ , he says as if he wouldn’t have wanted that. As if he hadn’t always wanted that. As if he hadn’t, as if he didn’t—as if he hadn’t tried with every second and every word not to ensure _that_.

Detached from your body and your brain, you can’t understand it. Why he says these things to the body in front of him, with its damp hair and bleeding leg and broken posture. He must not know that it’s empty.

He kneels in front of it, his nose level with knuckles. He stares at them as if his eyes alone could move them, and his hand twitches against the fold of his elbow. You see it, then. The flash of anger in his eyes. All the torment of a world you’re not a part of but which has captured him sparking for a second behind walls of brown irises and dilated pupils. He _hates_ that he can’t touch you.

 . . . _What do you want?_

You can’t ask him with your mouth, but he answers you anyway, reading the thought. Answers in a way that makes you want to evaporate: he looks up, over your broad and crumpled shoulder, to find the place where the core of you is hovering. A smile—wry and pitying and sickening—pulls back the corner of his mouth. He looks straight through you as he speaks.

          “Same thing I always wanted, Locs: You.”

_He’s lying._


	6. This is Not a Resurrection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again for the slow updating: I somehow ended up writing the little prelude pieces for the next TEN CHAPTERS when all I wanted to do was write the body of this one, and was then so exhausted with it that I--surprise, surprise--just ended up writing another angsty smut fic. 
> 
> . . . Oops.

Realization began with separation. That’s what you’ve told yourself: that the cracks between the two of you had their origins in the year you spent apart, laying the groundwork for Chorus. Over the course of those months, you had learned to live with loneliness. And you had learned to live with you. You developed contacts of your own and took jobs to pass the time and cushion your accounts, and you found as you did that you could communicate as well as you needed to, if no more and no better. You found that your instability was not an issue in the eyes of your employers, that they couldn’t be bothered to care about your insanity: it mattered less to them than it ever had to Felix. For one year, you were free. And when you surrendered that freedom to the Chorus mission, it left you somehow cold. Seeing Felix had made it warm again. Scorching.

You told yourself that your partnership must have broken in those months apart, and told yourself that the way it ached to hold him again had been a sign of everything that was to come, and not the beginning of the end of something else. Of your authority over your own mind. You had retained some of it, before then. A sliver of rationality that still knew how to fight him, however overwhelming your doubt. However desperate your dependence. But you’d made a mistake, after so long without him. The two of you should have become the enemies you pretended to be in the wake of so much independence, but you didn’t. Instead, wrapped in his arms, seeking shelter from how deeply you needed him in the safety of his body heat, you’d never been so glad to hurt. Never ached so much to be happy. Never been so prepared to part from your own heart, to give it and all you were to someone else.

_(You didn’t tell him that you loved him, then—that moment had come only in a dream, days after he died, and you had woken from it paralyzed and suffocating and struggling to wipe it from your mind—but it was the first time that you’d wanted to.)_

You’ve been telling yourself for weeks, now, that separation was the start.

Of what, you are far from certain.

 

*

 

It’s the heat that brings you back. Pooling in your pant leg, leaking through canvas to the mattress, it feels too warm as you go cold.  You haven’t lost enough to kill you: the bleed is too slow, a partial rupture of the wound, though you know in some faint corner of your mind that it isn’t going to stop. You know that it needs to. You don’t have the vocabulary left amidst the static in your head to know that exsanguination is what you’re at risk of, but you can see a never ending pool of drying red going sticky around your pale form in your mind’s uncertain eye. And you can see Felix, kneeling in it. Reveling in the iron scent and fading heat of what had been your life. And you are able to find at least one word, looking at that, though it isn’t the one you’d wanted: _No_.

You cling to it, unremarkable, monosyllabic, defiant. _No, no, no_. No to every second and every inch of what he’s done in coming here. In _being_ , still, when he needs to end. For existing in some sense that indicates he has a soul. For lurking in the mind he poisoned.

For dying at all.

 _No_ , too, to your lying here, still prepared to follow him after everything—

 _No_ , to adding another second to your lost decades of doing nothing, of contributing nothing, of being nothing but wrong. _No._ To your broken body and unwilling fingers. To surrendering when, for once in your shadow of a life, you’ve done something that could make you more and better than yourself.

The storage unit you’re _still_ bleeding for fell to the floor at some point you can’t remember. You collect it again in your fingers, moving to set it on your pillow only to drop it to the mattress instead as you begin to understand that _bleeding_ and _stop_ are the words to match the images crawling through your hazy head, and that _stop_ is what you must do next, and so your aimless thoughts reach for the first object in view which might accomplish that. The unit bounces on the mattress beside you as you plant the pillow in your lap and press it into our leg with your forearm, putting all your weight behind it.

You think in some hazy way that this could be somehow strange. That this is the wrong material with which to dam your rivers of blood. But what you should use instead, what action a saner man would take, won’t present itself inside your head; a joke of self-preservation with a punchline you don’t understand. All that you know is that you are bleeding, that you need to stop bleeding lest Felix end up basking in it— _No—_ and that Felix is still there, still watching you. You glance at him as the world slowly clears, as your eyes and brain recalibrate. He scoffs at your first aid. Says something that’s lost on you.

_Bleeding, stop, no. Bleeding, stop. **No.**_

He frowns when next you look at him. Minutes, eons later. A faded scowl. He looks more like air somehow, now, the anger in his eyes only embers as the rest of him wavers. You turn your own eyes off— _No—_ and force yourself to ignore him as well as your panic-blitzed brain will allow. It almost helps, in some perverse way, that your grinding, airy processing and the cold comfort of your shock render it impossible for you to make sense of his words. You know he’s speaking to you, you can feel the crackling of his frustration, but none of it can touch you. He hates that he _cannot_ —

You can still feel his heat. His ethereal anger. He scalds you while the blood on your leg cools and your body reconnects. While you parse through the memories of words, piecing together how they work so that you might spell out for yourself whether it’s still fear or simply exhaustion that has you shaking still. _He’s dead—_ He’s supposed to be. _Ghosts—_ Are not something you can claim never to have believed in, because you’ve never given them any thought. _Get him away—_

That urge makes sense to you, even if nothing else does.

But you know Felix doesn’t cool so easily. He smolders and fixates. Conquers and takes without armistice or accord. There is no way that you know of to be rid of him. Nothing you can think of that doesn’t bring his voice right back to your head. Nothing you can do but refuse to join him, pressing your impromptu bandage into your thigh, clinging to life regardless of whether or not you ever deserved it.

Yet, strangely, that’s enough. You feel his anger fading. Feel the loss of his heat, and his cold. The scalding stops.

When you look at him again it’s in infra-red, and he is gone. In infra-red, in ultraviolet. In full spectrum, and the warmth of grayscale, you are alone.

Your voice cracks when you say his name.

He answers neither in your head, nor out loud.

He is gone, lost like the kind of wake-sweating, wake-paralyzed nightmares that stayed with you long after the Army left, and it is relief, rather than the panic, that has you hyperventilating.

He could come back. You know, now, that he could come back. That he will.

And so you scramble for the storage unit, to plug it in, forcing your fingers to close around it and release it and open all it contains, and you hurry, hurry, before he can return, before he can see you, to learn what it is that your bleeding bought—what opportunity it holds.


	7. This is Not Resignation

When doubt and derision collapsed the last of you, you looked to Felix for the world. And he made it for you.

The real _reason_ you never saw him, never knew, was that Felix had constructed a whole new universe for you, though you would have settled for the home he’d made, too. The shelter. He put the name above the door that only he knew, like a sign that you could trust him, that you could feel safe ignoring his initials etched into every exposed inch of the woodwork. His imprint on the welding. It looked like welts.  Like wounded places in the metal. Like the marks he used to leave on you.

_(He preferred tasting you over devouring you, always leading with his tongue. His teeth were like a warning. A retaliation. His way of taking you back when you’d wandered because he knew you liked the way they felt.)_

You accepted what he offered, choosing a new kind of blindness, and while you looked elsewhere Felix built you everything you’d ever begged for. A world made of words and perceptions and the sting of the way he mocked you, the burn where his teeth caught and sank deep into your skin and thoughts and feelings. You let his kingdom distract you as his hands plied open your ribcage and rewound all the fibers of your heart. A gruesome but subtler construction. A hungry, needy, intimate act that you didn’t want to witness; “ _I’m not a soldier_ ,” was what escaped you lips in the moment when you finally made yourself look down. When you caught him.

 _I'm not a soldier_ , as you discovered him elbow deep inside your chest, covered in your blood.

_I’m a monster._

Like he had always been.

_(But the difference between you—and he’d understood this—was that you’d have cared what you’d become if only you'd have seen it.  And so he'd drowned you in his perfect version of yourself, and you’d loved what he made you see there almost as much as you loved what you saw in him.)_

You’d known what he was, but not what he _was to you_.

Until that moment. _I’m not a soldier,_ as you realized that he’d become your eyes, only to lie to you. To show you ultraviolet where there should have been color. Infrared where there should have been gray.

_(You saw the too-bright truth and you wondered: How long had you not known?)_

Even as you came to understand it, you wished in some frightened corner of your mind that it wasn’t true. Not only because of the implications of it—that it was never really love that he had for you—but because of how little would be _left_ if you accepted the AI’s truth. Only an hour before that moment Felix had told you again that you had orders, that you had him, and you’d been _glad_ for it. For his gentle-heavy hand on your shoulder that gave weight and substance to the world you’d tried not to see collapsing, falling to pieces in your peripheral while Felix stood in the middle of everything, ordering you not to look. And you wanted, desperately, to return to that weight those orders that authority, but the moment that you understood was also the moment in which you finally disobeyed him, though it felt strange and sour to do so. Felix had built your cardboard world from truth. He laid out the path he wanted you to walk using fragments that you gave him, and it felt natural to do what he asked of you. It felt familiar. Trying to do anything else, before then, only ever left you paralyzed. And so, until then, you’d done, and you’d done, and you’d _done_ without ever asking why.

_(Under Felix’s orders, in his cardboard world, you’d fought Washington and his halo with a feeling in your gut like a cold stone and with a knot in your windpipe that made it harder to keep up, to recover, to stand each time Carolina knocked you down. That made it easier for you to hit her, until Washington put a knife in your shoulder and his words in your gut. Drove into the exact point where the cold stone sat so that it and the damage it had done all came spilling out of you at once.)_

He hadn’t _wanted_ you to ask why.

Ask, about the stone in your stomach and the closed hand feeling on your heart and the feeling—aching and clenching and racing—that closed on you every time he laughed. At someone else, at you. All of it the same.

Ask, about the way your skin felt as it gathered beneath his fingernails alongside other samples, ones he’d scraped from faceless New Republic soldiers that he’d later sacrifice to you. Offerings to an empty god, given with half-eaten hearts.

Ask, if he truly believed in you, in everything you were, that he let you claim to be. Ask, why he liked you the way he did. What the benefit was of a shattered soldier.

But he didn’t want you to ask, and you hadn’t, and you realized only later that, even if you had, he never would have told you. So you’d had to find it out yourself.

_(The failure of the fighting hurt you so much less than success. You knew that as you bled beside him, though he couldn't see the wounds in you even as they delivered what could have been your epitaph in the form of your own ship descending to destroy you. Instead he told you to get behind him, not knowing that was always where you'd been, and when light and chaos pulled you away from him, you didn’t know how to fight back. As you bled from the places where the stone once sat and where broken bones reared up to strike at tired muscle, you didn’t know why you should._ _)_

You found it out, you looked. You looked into the collapsing sky and there was a slow and sudden moment of seconds of months of eons in which you finally recognized that your Felix colored world had the flavor of a lie, even though the initial knowing, the basis of your truth, was less like revelation than exsanguination. It was only later that you would let yourself _acknowledge_ the taste which had been there all along. That you’d known would be there, if only you’d put out your tongue.

_(No copper saturation, no pinch of teeth, would overwhelm the taste of your anguish over the way he spoke to you when you didn't, wouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't go on.)_

It was Felix, in the end, who helped you warp that bitter flavor into words.

           _“I’m doing this for me.”_

That was all he'd ever done.

 

*

 

If you had done things right the first time, you wouldn’t need to be here.

The data you pulled on your first mission was a start, was enough to tell you that you were on a path made of more than hopes and prayers for redemption. Or, at least, of restoration. It had _not_ been enough to tell you where else you needed to go. What you could _do._

And so you are here.

Failing.

          “Too bad I can’t hold a gun anymore. This almost looks like fun.”

“ _Quiet.”_

It’s been eight days. You have seen him on six of them. More, the closer you came to action. To your mission. Like a moth to flame he’d come to mock it, talking for hours on end until you screamed. Hurtled something at him. You don’t remember what it was. But you remember it went through him to the wall.

_(You woke to the smell of your half rotten floorboards and splinters in your cheek and in your soul. With bite marks on the heels of your hands and samples of your skin snagged beneath your nails, clawed out of your head as you dug your fingers into your scalp and covered your ears in a desperate bid for distraction and silence.)_

Even as you shout at him now, you buckle. Fall against the crate you’d meant to kneel behind so that your kneecap groans against the protection of your armor.

         “Then again,” Felix continues, sing-song words turning to venom, to ice, _sounding_ as yawning and empty and menacing as a chasm _looks_ beneath a tightrope, “I’d probably just shoot _you_ if I could.”

Shoot you, maim you. Torture you. You know that threat is coming before it does, and you breathe through it, clutching your gun.

                “It’d keep you still while I turned your fingernails into a necklace—Ooh, or maybe your teeth. How do you feel about dentists, Locs? I don’t think I ever asked.”

You struggle to ignore him. That should be easier than it is, considering the situation you’ve placed yourself in. You’re high above the dirty floor of yet another warehouse, suspended on a grated-floored catwalk, looking down through the spaces at the swarm of pirates-turned security (or perhaps it’s the other way around) shooting at you from below. You are boxed in, inset, tucked against a pile of cast aside storage crates you presume are only up here because they are empty. Because they are flimsy, lightweight, and breakable. They rattle and buckle under fire as your opposition climb the stairs to either side of you. One of the larger ones, which Felix’s apparition is leaning against, explodes, raining shrapnel over you, pinging with a metallic, plastic, scattered sort of drumbeat over your armor. The sound reverberates in your helmet so badly that you want to tear it off. You have no tolerance for noise, anymore. Since your reprieve of blessed silence. Since that silence shattered under Felix. Who is still. Talking.

You’d shoot him, but you already know it doesn’t work.

              “Personally, I always hated ‘em,” he declares, chattering as he shifts to seat himself atop one of the remaining crates, “Kind of wanted to put this one’s drill through his eyeball that I had when I was a kid—I didn’t. Motherfucker would have deserved it . . . but what can I say? I hadn’t grown into all my talents, yet: I was probably fourteen, fifteen at the time.  You know, young. Just yanked the wisdom teeth. So, I didn’t touch _him_ , but _Mom. Oh,_ Mom wouldn’t stop asking about it, why I was so _mad,_ was the anesthetic _working_ did it _hurt_ did I _need something_ —and that was the first time I ever hit _her_. Blamed it on whatever they put me under with. You know I cried a little about it—not hard, on Vicodin, as it turns out—and you know what she did? Marched into the supermarket with a black eye, and bought me ice-cream.”

You don’t want to hear this.

“Shut up,” you growl at him over the increasing cacophony of bullets. They whistle through Felix where he sits, in one side and out the other, coming away cold. Felix just laughs. Felix just snarls.

            “. . . She’s still alive, you know. Thinks I went missing. Has no idea that she outlived me.”

“Felix, _stop—_ ”

You hate how desperate you sound. You don’t have to listen to it long.

The crate he’s sitting on explodes out from under him. Felix wavers, setting a bare foot down without falling, arms out to the side as if he needs to balance, though so much of his movement now is drifting. A hunk of metal the size of his head plows into your side, sharp-edged and unforgiving, slicing a chunk out of your bent arm just above the elbow while the bullet that prompted its motion buries itself in the armor on your thigh. You will have a bruise, you are certain, in the silhouette of the ceramic it presses into you, the Kevlar of your bodysuit doing nothing to mitigate the widely dispersed impact. Your leg goes numb.

There are three people bearing down on you from the end of the catwalk. You are able to shoot down two before a bullet glances off your helmet, snapping your neck sideways as it goes. You think you can feel your vertebrae separating. Not enough to kill you, not enough to sever their precious contents, break your spine, but your bright gray vision flashes white and blanks to void, leaving you for a moment with nothing but the overbearing agony of sound. The chin of your helmet knocks against the component of your chest harness that rises over your shoulder. Pain echoes up your jaw.

You spray aimless bullets, a desperate, pathetic waste of ammo, in the direction of the staircase, trying to place the opposition in your mind before you’ve even recovered from your blindness. From the feeling, brought on by so many sudden points of pain, that you have lost your sense of space. That there is no body left to center, only a jaw, a neck, an aching thigh. A bleeding arm and a concussion.

You feel Felix come to kneel beside you. He is so cold.

             “The thing about that is—Mom, I mean,” he says, half a whisper, all too eager. “What I really just wish I could tell her is that it isn’t so bad. Well, besides being stuck with you. But _dying—_ Locs, it’s weird. It’s _quick, b_ ut you feel all of it. Every fucking second. It just doesn’t exactly _hurt_.”

There are five more men on the staircase. Six behind you.

Felix speaks with an uncharacteristic, reverent hush. A man witnessing his personal rapture.

           “I remember,” he says, fixated on you with a gravity that you can feel, an icy, empty space sucking up hope and light and air, “I felt the impact—hit shoulders first, by the way, thought I might make it for a second there before my head went down—and I felt my neck break in _three_ places. Did I tell you that? Nice fucking work, asshole. You really got me. Crack, crack crack, I could hear it. But man, it had nothing on my head. Fucking helmet broke in the back, didn’t cushion the impact for shit, so my neck is going, and I’m still pretty much awake when _bam:_ brain? Welcome to where my skull used to be. Loudest shit I ever heard. And that put an end to it, really. Hard to feel anything when your brain is turning into soup, no matter how much time slows down . . . ”

You shoot a man through Felix’s stomach. Your HUD can see past him, even if you can’t with your hazy, recalibrating eyes. He just keeps talking. Faster, faster, faster. Breathless. Eager. Starving.

            “I did feel my heart tear, though, before I went,” he tells you. “That I remember. You know, it’s all tied down in there, all this sinew and shit—real pain in the ass to cut through, in case you were wondering—but it’s kind of like whiplash: hit something hard enough, and it just rips right out. Bang. The end.”

He bites down on his own words, snagging his teeth on his lower lip. Stares at you with electric, lidded eyes.

 _He gains satisfaction from this,_ you realize. _He thinks you are going to die here._

_He is wrong._

You switch your faulty camo back on, for all the good its flickering does you, and flip to your knees to peer over the railing of the catwalk behind you. You push a crate over the edge of the walkway as you do. It shatters on the floor, injuring no one. Felix squeezes in beside you, sandwiched without touching you between your left arm and your only remaining crate’s worth of cover. Everyone is shouting. Your head hurts, from your neurons to your scalp. Everything is loud. Even your thoughts. But Felix doesn’t hear them, or doesn’t care.

           “. . .  Really?” He hisses. “No response to that? Are you shitting me?”

You need to silence him. You need to think.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” you snap at him. _And I don’t care, tell him you don’t care—_

But you don’t make it that far. There is too much happening. Your camo melts away as a bullet enters your right side. As the last crate explodes, shattering through Felix, the sound crashing through your brain.

 _“_ I don’t even give a shit,” he snaps. “But _come_. _on_. Locus. I just told you that you ripped my heart out! You can’t just let quality drama like that go to waste.”

_Yes I can._

Felix snarls.

 _That_ he heard.

But you don’t want him to be right about you, today. You don’t want to die—as you often do, in his presence—here, lost in noise and pain and the constant freezing proximity of him. Not when you know that there is more, one doorway away, one floor down, information that could probably end your self-declared mission right here, right now, if only you could reach it alive.

Information that you know, also, is backed up somewhere else. Wouldn’t be impossible to find.

_Yes I can._

You have bigger choices to make than which element of Felix will finally be the thing that kills you. That gets you killed.

That thought resonates with him. Makes him lurch. You try not to look at him, you are always _trying_ not to look at him, but you know that he is watching you, leaning as far into your space as his inability to touch you will allow, with scrutiny in his dark eyes. Terror. Intoxicated _wanting._

         “You’re fucking insane,” he says. Something less than hateful hidden beneath his scathing tone. Awe in his undercurrents.

“I am not,” you tell him.

And you line up your shot.

Across the room from you, another catwalk is filling with enemies who are sizing you up like the overeager members of a firing squad, as ready to take a bite of you as any enemy, every enemy, you have ever met, and then some. So glad to see you fail. Their scopes aligned with your head. They are standing to either side of a crate. It is not empty. It is marked, on the side facing you, with a warning: EXPLOSIVE, written in two of the three languages you know, along with other words. Labels promising a holocaust.

         “Are you trying to die?” Felix asks you.

_(Asks the way he used to ask to fuck you. Like an order, like a threat.)_

“No,” you answer.

Felix sucks a sound between his teeth, an airless breath like the soundtrack to some filthy release, as you press down on the trigger. He leans in close beside you, waiting for the heat, the destruction as you duck behind what little cover you have left. Felix is just so _cold_.


	8. This is Not a Failure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things: 
> 
> 1) WOW sorry for the hiatus. I have to be in kind of a specific brain-space to write this, and I needed a nudge (and a new approach to this chapter) to get back to it.
> 
> 2) KIND-OF-SPOILER ALERT: There are vague allusions to content from the latest RVB 14 episode (the one screened at RTX on 7/2.) It's not explicit, and doesn't reference the events of the episode, but does reference a certain line that has A LOT of interesting and major implications, as well as referencing a new character on the show. If you're someone who doesn't want to see ANY kind of spoilers, content-related or otherwise, you have been warned.

It is, frankly, miraculous that you could warp together the way you did. What seemed so obvious as it was happening is mystifying looking back. You used to need someone to hold you together. You used to need someone to keep him from turning on you, someone to keep you from killing him when he did. How that changed—

You worked alone with him. Again and again. Over and over. You learned to _communicate._ He learned how to bend you. You learned how to bend yourself.

You hated him for how he treated you, once. Before it became all you knew.

Still, it took half a death and a half a bottle before you surrendered your whole self to him. _(Half a death in battle half a death you gave to him, the burn still in your throat and on his lips, the suicide made easier by the liquor.)_

There was a time you used to fight him. Fight him like you meant it, required a mediator. Required a partner required the army required some other voice in your head. Not his, not like this. But you stopped. You stopped fighting you started cooperating and at some point, you gave to him. You gave all to him.

_(Felix suggested it, you initiated it, and you came together like a car crash because how, after everything, could you not? And you gave. You gave him punishment you gave him pain you gave him pleasure and brutality and love, and he took. He took he took and took from hurt and exhilaration and intensity and control, and you found it was an exchange that worked for you.)_

There was a time before.

You wonder if you can get back.

*

          “So, you're fucked.”

You are not. You keep telling yourself that. You are not.

          “You sure? Blew the place to hell, thinking you could find a way around, and now you can't. That's pretty much the definition of fucked.”

_Get out of my head._

_You're the one who put me here. Don't whine._

“I want you gone.”

           “Do you?”

Of course you do. The way he eats at you. A weight on your heart haunting the hole he left, trying to fill it. Trying to take it over. Trying to take you with him.

“Absolutely.”

Felix snorts. He leans against the table—or appears to—wafting cold in your direction as he leans over the datapad you're staring into, searching for clues. For leads. Anything to make up for the loss you took last time because you weren’t good enough to succeed on your own.

You need to be re-taught. You need to re-learn—

You stand up from the table, move past Felix, trying not to look like you're giving him a wide berth, but he knows and he laughs and he lunges up behind you, brings his lips to the ear they can't brush and hisses:

          “You can't undo me, Locs. You don’t want to.”

Your breath catches and your spine locks, vertebrae grinding into each other as you freeze, stumbling over the step you'd been halfway through when he spoke. He laughs.

          _Moron,_ he scoffs in your head, so satisfied by your reaction.

“No,” you force through your frozen throat, all you CAN force, _I can't undo._ You can atone.

          _"_ _No_ is right. Because you did what you did. And that's on you.”

“You let me do it. You--” you gave to him, _(You let him in, too, there were times he spoke your name your real name and you only half hated him, times you feared for him, times you opened to him, cracking like a skull under the butt of your shotgun.)_

          “You made your choices.”

 “You encouraged me. You made me believe they were right.” _We used to be good._ You let him convince you that you still were.

            _Were we really?_ The thought, dripping the venom of his voice, bleeding doubt, runs through the back of your mind. It doesn’t make you angry. It makes you something else, something hollow and churning, tight in your throat. It's what he says out loud that thaws you, opens up to rage.

         “And? So what? I make people believe what they want to believe, Locus. It's just who I am.”

“But you did it to _me_!”

The shout is terrible, all battlefield gravel. Felix trips back—drifts, really, but there's a shudder to it, a flickering of his muted form—a nasty flashing in his eyes.

 _“_ I—”

“Shut up. I'm not finished talking.”

Felix's eyes go so wide it seems you should be able to see into them, see if it’s brain, mind, memory or spirit that lets him exist here alongside you when you'd meant to let him end.

“You knew what I wanted to be. You knew what I set out to do. And you let me turn my back on it when I _trusted_ you.” Your voice doesn’t break, though something in your chest does. All over again.

Felix shifts, flickers, knits his brows and scowls.

          “That's your own fault.”

“ _No._ It wasn’t.”

Felix looks aghast for only a moment. And then he sneers. A dangerous snarl. Chilling your stomach. A wall comes up inside you above your black and broken heart.

And then he flickers out of existence. He's gone.

You wish it were for good.


End file.
